A few months ago I began this post but in one fell swoop it disappeared from my computer and I couldn’t find it. Miraculously it has reappeared today albeit in a weird form, so have printed it off and will reattempt to type and publish it.
I received this text from a caring friend and thought it a good place to start this blog.
“I have learned that when sadness comes to visit, all I can do is say ‘I see you’, spend some time with it, get up and say goodbye. I don’t push it away. I own it and then let it go.’ – Carolina Zacaria.
I have concluded that when you are confronted with the reality that life can be taken away in virtually an instant, it makes you realise how important it is after you have lost a loved one, to recognise the opportunities we are given to experience happiness, and to accept them graciously and without guilt. The purpose of these morsels of joy might just be for our healing.
As a single person now and a retired farmer, it is a new phenomenon to have so many hours a day to do as I please. It could give birth to a bounty of creativity. If I want to get up in the middle of the night and read a book or write, I can, without fear of waking my hard working husband. I could sit at my writer’s desk and spill stories for days, eating only when the hunger pangs became pain and alerted me – like the masters of old – the Beethovens, Van Goghs, Gaugins of the world. This is all a tad romantic and unrealistic of course. Well for me anyway. I still have a business to run, animals to care for, family to love, care for and socialise with, and friends with whom to do the same. All these are important to me.
I took a drive to Kapunda a while back. It’s an old copper mining town on the edge of the Barossa. As I drove, my head was full of all the usual stuff – the daily grind of jobs to be done, important decisions to be made and the emotions that go hand in hand with times like these. I gave myself a stern talking to. ‘Ok. Empty your mind, make way for art, open your eyes and mind to what’s around you.’ It took some doing, some insistence to make all the rest go away and see that magnificent world that is always there. But we can look right at it and miss it in the humdrum of life. The two poems I have put up today are testament to this. Like meditation, this appreciation of Nature brings me comfort.
Shafts of speared sunlight through solemn old trees
Songs of veiled birds and weathery insects
Dewy Spring grass beneath my bare feet
The smell of it crushing as I lay on it close
to watch stumbling beetles at tedious toil …. (an excerpt).
BIRRIBI
I sit here as the day fades
A crisp breeze teases the back of my neck
and ruffles my hair
Stirs the camp fire into a friendly rage
The new heat burns my face
and the smell of smoke
evokes the days of old farm gatherings
The big old gum tree skeleton
silhouettes with twilight
Crows and magpies
cockatoos
sit way up high on it and wonder down at me
The hills just over there
are glowing with the setting sun
and for a breath
the trunks of big gums white as snow
The beer is wholesome
Bird noise teeming
Without this night song there would only be
a wind hush through the grasses
Soon
simply the hush
and the cracking of the fire
Suddenly a shower of darkened late galahs
screech across the deepest blue
of coming night
and now the mighty hillside rocks
divulge their shapes
The evening light has brought them close
and for a trice I think I hear the ghostly chatter
of the tribe that lived and roamed around here long ago
and I am one of them
Today I am thinking about my upbringing in the fifties and sixties. It was a simple but charmed life. What about the childhoods of those living in less gentle places – those living in the urban jungles of Redfern, Broadmeadows and the like through those times? They were probably just as charmed in their own way. I would like to do some research and write about these burroughs, but could I ever do them justice when they weren’t my place? My place was the Barossa Valley. People were busy re-establishing their lives after the scarcities, terror and grief of war. There were war damaged men living in our town – returned soldiers who would be forever alone with their demons. Living in the Barossa, a wine growing region, they had ready and cheap access to the ‘plonk’ that helped occlude their memories. They lived in shanties, worked in the vineyards only until they’d earned enough money to buy the next basketed stone jar of wine. They were harmless enough but I was disturbed, as a child, to see these men staggering down the street muttering indiscernible diatribes. We’d just give them a wide berth, but from an early age I had a pathos about the war and have only ever felt a deep empathy for these men, or any returned soldier, who can never again live life with an untroubled mind.
As kids, we ‘owned’ the town. Roamed all over it. Our parents never knew where we were as we ourselves had no idea, on setting out, where our whims would lead us. After a substantial rain one day we decided it would be fun to slide down a fifteen foot embankment to the creek. With each slide the red clay soil became more slippery. Our undies were never worn again – forever stained red and worn out. Another game was sidling along narrow sheep tracks worn into the creek embankments twenty feet above a raging winter water course. One slip would have had us hurtling down into the fast flowing stream. This was usually on the way to old Alfie Fuhrbach’s place. He was a first world war veteran. Lived in a shack along the creek, suffered from the D.T’s and always had his shotgun at hand – ready to fire at imagined enemy soldiers some of whom could easily have been us. This was sport, to try to get past his house without him spotting us. The creek was certainly our territory.
I don’t know if there has been a theme to this blog today. Just a bit of ramble I suppose about my love of nature, and where and how the passion originated, and the value of it to have established my life philosophies, to soothe me and bring me a fully topped up feeling of happiness.
I will always enjoy writing about my childhood so more next time perhaps.
As a writer one hopes that people are reading this. It would be nice to know who, so if its you and you want to make yourself known or share something, there is a comments box below.
Keep safe,
Sue